Playlist: Imagined futures

by tacet

The Articulate Silences team has recently moved to a new website on contemporary classical music called counter-melody. We’ll be reblogging our posts here on Articulate Silences for a while so that none of you miss out.

Today on counter-melody: Imagined futures, a playlist exploring emancipatory politics in the musical avant-garde of the 70s and 80s. Here’s a snippet of what we had to say:

Though arguably constituted by an underlying utopian drive, the musical avant-garde has rarely been explicit in its desire for political and social emancipation. Perhaps music’s ambiguity best lends itself to tracing only the sense – an ever-forming outline – of imagined futures, attracting both spurners of didacticism and suckers for romantic futility.